Requiescat in pace - Nataliya Vassilievna Slobodyan

One of the greatest ballerinas of the Soviet Union, N. V. Slobodyan taught workshops at the Lviv National Ballet of Ukraine almost every day until she was 90. Just a few weeks after I took this picture of her, she very sadly passed away.

She was the most extraordinarily jolly lady, and witnessed some of the most traumatic events of twentieth century history. She qualified as a dancer on the day that war broke out between Germany and the Soviet Union, she witnessed her ballet teacher being led away to Babi Yar, she recalled a bomb landing in the front rows of the audience during an air raid.

Despite all that, she was irrepressible. When asked what she planned to do when she was a hundred, she replied that "the only thing that should have a O in it is the door of the ladies toilets" (in Ukraine and Russia ladies toilets are marked with an O and gents with a triangle).

Russian State Ballet of Siberia Part 2

Russian State Ballet of Siberia, Part 1

From a recent visit by the Siberian ballet to Edinburgh:

Behind the scenes at the Lviv National Ballet of Ukraine and Lviv Ballet School, Part 2

Behind the scenes - Lviv National Ballet of Ukraine (part 1)

There is part 1 of a gallery of images taking a behind the scenes look at Lviv National Ballet of Ukraine over on my blog here

Behind the scenes at Lviv National Ballet of Ukraine, Part 1

I have been back again taking some pictures of the excitement, sweat, dedication and talent behind the scenes at Lviv National Ballet of Ukraine, and at Lviv State Ballet School. Here is one selection of images, and I will post some more in the next day or two:  

Photographing ballet in Ukraine

The last two weeks I've been away in Lviv, taking some images for my ballet series. I have a stack of films to scan, but until then here is a taste to set the mood:

Part 3: Baby Phoenix - Warsaw Ballet School

A few steps across the road, Warsaw Ballet School provides the National Ballet with fodder in the form of eager students. Earning - and retaining - a place at the school is tough.

Polish Phoenix 2 - The Palace of Culture

Symbol of Soviet Stalinist power, of the reconstruction of the city following the devastation of the uprising, and the most iconic building in Warsaw. The Palace of Culture.

Polish phoenix - the Warsaw Ballet

From the ashes of the Warsaw Uprising, there was built the largest theatre in the world. The Grand Theatre, a monumental reconstruction project, became home to the Warsaw Ballet, today renamed the Polish National Ballet. The influence of the Soviet Union in the rebuilding at the same time as the Stalinist style Palace of Culture, is palpable. Today, the close connections with Russia continue, with tight connections with the ballets in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Minsk Part 2 - ballet

The first time I saw the ballet in Minsk was a performance of Romeo and Juliet in 1994. I was visiting Minsk in a previous life as a lawyer, and the ballet was the big attraction in town. In fact, it was pretty much the only tourist attraction in town at the time, except for oddballs like me who were into Soviet architecture and the minutiae of post-Soviet life. And Minsk was pretty hardcore Soviet. In many ways, it still is, as I discovered when I went back again this year. But even for an oddball, the ballet was a more than welcome break. Sovietness is interesting for a while for those of us lucky enough not to have had to actually live in it, but escaping from it is even nicer. Which helps to explain the big attraction of ballet in Soviet times.

Minsk's University of Culture is an unusual institution - one of the few places that you can obtain a degree in ballet. What the dancers there do on stage is fantastic, but I wasn't there to record it. Certainly not this time anyway - I was in Minsk for Old New Year when there wasn't an enormous amount of dancing going on anyway. And photographing dancing has limitations - actually watching the performance itself is probably more interesting than looking at a photo that just records a pirouette.

I'm interested in what makes these amazing people tick - how they live, how they train, what the environment they grow up in looks like. What life looks like for a ballet dancer beyond the glamour of stage. The photographer is a kind of entymologist, and ballet is a particularly interesting window into the Belarussian, Ukrainian, Polish, Russian anthill.